


pop rocks & soda

by casualbird



Series: killugontent [1]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Background LeoPika - Freeform, Character Study, Childhood Friends, Gay, Healing, M/M, Post-Canon, Reunions, canon-typical childhood trauma flavor, death by middle school crush is hot now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:49:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26256682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: Killua--older, wiser, and the beneficiary of alotof therapy--is entirely capable of living without Gon.This, however, soundsboring as all shit.
Relationships: Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Series: killugontent [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932280
Comments: 17
Kudos: 141





	pop rocks & soda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [apterousAvian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/apterousAvian/gifts).



> my take on the big gay killugon reunion fic! canon-compliant as far as the anime goes, but i haven't read the manga yet so i have no idea how it jives with that.

It’s a great relief that Killua, at the advanced age of twenty, is not living the life he’d envisioned for himself at eight. That he is not the man he thought he’d be when he was twelve, thirteen, tearing up the world.

He doesn’t have a permanent address, that much he’d predicted. He flashes his Hunter license at any number of swank hotels, bleeds minibars dry of candy bars and cola. Builds blanket forts, still, and hides in them with Alluka, blue TV shine glinting off laughing eyes.

Killua gets, he thinks, into a perfectly respectable amount of mischief, these days. He will not dispense with his childish things, least of all the casual dissidence.

It’s only that ‘mischief’ does not mean the things it used to. It does not mean spitting vulgar venomous threats, dipping in and out of deathmatches, knocking traumas back and forth like tetherballs. Does not mean living on a hair trigger, hackles raised until he can’t remember what it feels like to _stop._

(Well. Gravedigging takes a long time. This is one that he has yet to lay to rest.)

In his dotage, he has scaled back. He stampedes his skateboard through city squares, yes, but without deadly purpose. The only lightning storms he causes anymore are the ones composed of cusswords, and even this has been tempered. Each time he wilts flowers in this way, a cool thousand Jenny clinks into Alluka’s swear jar.

Make no mistake--he can and he _will_ still eat just as many Chocorobos as he could in his prime. Perhaps more.

He just thinks--Alluka is so _small,_ even now. He suspects he’ll never really think of her as grown, and--

And if someone suggested, even _implied_ that it’d be alright for her to get into the kind of scrapes he and Gon used to?

Killua would rip their fucking kidneys out.

This, of course, meant recognizing that he ought to have ripped the kidneys out of all of them--Hisoka, and Netero, and maybe even Kite and Wing. Maybe even Bisky.

Mostly Hisoka. Well, perhaps mostly Netero. Or Ging, Ging seemed like a good guess. There wasn’t any itemized list, it had taken enough time in therapy to get to this point to begin with. And late-dragging calls with groggy Leorio, and more stress-shopping than he was willing to admit, and several radical changes of hairstyle.

And a tattoo, because he could _hear_ the way his mother would shriek. But, cool as it was, it was beside the point. 

The point was, the paradigm Killua lived in had shifted so drastically he could scarcely stay on his feet. What was normal a decade, even half a decade ago struck him now with a screaming dissonance, a neon splatter across the ‘normal’ he’d made since.

Which was not, by any reasonable definition, normal. Perish the thought--Killua was still a bright-eyed little billionaire, the world his jungle-gym oyster.

It’s just that the playground used to be more of an arena for lethal combat.

Sometimes, though he will not tell Alluka this, he misses it. Misses that verve, that vibrant youthful immortality. Like death was something for the old and irrelevant; for squares.

Sometimes he misses Gon. Gon, whose daring mixed with his like bleach and ammonia, fuming until they could breathe nothing else. Gon, who was the midday sun to Killua’s snowdrifts, glaring in their eyes.

Several times a day--sometimes upwards of ten, depending on the atmospheric pressure, Killua would flex the joints in his fingers, roll his wrists around the ancient ache of _it has to be Killua._

He’d crack all his knuckles, as loudly as he could, and try not to decide whether his prodigious decrepitude was a badge of honor, try to put it out of his mind.

It rarely worked, because Gon is--because Gon _always has been_ the crux of the matter. His friend, the one he’d so gleefully been snowblind with. Some maudlin bullshit like that. Killua cringed, gnashing on himself to think like this--like the center of a jelly donut, gushing out onto his cheeks and chin. Drippy, staining, sweet enough to hurt his throat. Hellish to clean up.

He’d tried, though, and thought he’d made an alright fist of it. Got onto his hands and knees, scrubbed at the grout with a toothbrush. Splashed it all away with harsh lemon-scent, and missed the mess when it was gone, even though by this age Killua has grudgingly acknowledged that one’s better off with these dismal, drudgy tasks done.

Of course, the stain--like a gunshot at his solarplexus, only too-pink and splattered with strawberry seeds--would never go away.

Killua decided it’d be best if he wasn’t around Gon, until it washed out. Or, failing that, until he trashed that old shirt, too-small and stretched out at the cuffs.

It was always in the bottom of his suitcase, though, and always the last thing he’d toss in the wash.

It’s not as if they didn’t talk at all--Killua could only speak for himself, but he’d never been willing to risk the crush of radio silence. So they exchanged quick giggling voicemails, and letters on neon stationery turned up regularly at Whale Island, postmarked all over the world. They’d text, keeping each other on an IV drip of poorly-angled selfies, Alluka or Mito or just their own bright-grinning cheeks stuffed into frame.

Actual calls sometimes, too. Hushed and earnest, made with legs swinging off the sides of scenic overlooks, fire escapes. Exhaustive, _exhausting,_ running til the first blush of dawn. The kinds of conversations that always begin _it’s been too long!!_ and always end _I miss you, I love you, I’m sorry._

Killua, the adult who loves his therapist, knows that this can in theory be enough. Killua the hopeless, petulant little poet knows that theory is for squares.

It probably _would_ be best if he wasn’t around Gon, but that was boring and he was getting sick to death of it. Every day he saw a cool bird, an interesting rock, every time he put away carbs and candy like his life depended on it, he thought _this would be so much better with Gon._

He lies awake in tangled hotel sheets, Alluka tucked against his side, and weigh it. The savage garden party that Gon is, versus the fear that seeing him would be like watching an old recording. Thinking ‘did you really sound like this, did you really look like this?’ Searching, sifting in grainy, low-lit footage.

Analysis paralysis. There is no winning or losing, here, but still the instinct lunges him. _If you can’t win, bolt._

Funny thing, he thought he’d gotten rid of that one, too. Evidently, it still sticks like a mold to the crevices of his hindbrain, still fires his most primal of synapses.

Thus, Killua does not invite Gon to any of Alluka’s birthday parties, nor matches at Heaven’s Arena, nor visits to old friends. He wants to. He wants to see Gon’s face when met with Alluka’s enormous gooey birthday cakes, Hisoka bleeding on the jumbotron, the surprisingly well-kept home that Knuckle and Shoot have made together.

The closest he comes is a challenge, delivered halting and half-laughing down the phone: _If you gotta see me, dingus, come and catch me._ It’s equal parts sentimental and tactical--Mito, he understands, has entombed Gon in backlogged schoolwork. Algebra worksheets, _To Hunt a Mockingbird._ The kind of thing that’ll chain him to his kitchen table for _years_

But not, and this is key, _forever._

This is the brilliance of Killua’s plan--eventually, and he will have no way of knowing when, it will blow up brilliantly in his face. Like a confetti cracker, only Gon falls out.

And it does.

He’s in a toy store when it happens, waiting out a freak squall by pool-noodle fencing with Alluka. She’s beating the crap out of him, and he will swear blind that it is not because he is going easy on her. He’s been teaching her since they met up, how to watch her own back, and she’s gotten pretty fierce. Only a small percentage of his focus is on making sure they don’t murder the displays--the rest is on parrying her, and on her round-cheeked grin.

As such, none of it is on anything outside a ten-foot radius of his great battle, and as such, he doesn’t hear the sloppy, sodden footsteps sloshing up behind him.

Then, Alluka stops. Lights up as if it’s time for her favorite cartoon, and Killua turns and--

\--he’ll never get over how blisteringly uncool it is that he drops the pool noodle.

There’s Gon, hair and clothes plastered with rain, sporting a drippy satisfied grin like a dog who’s just come bounding from a lake.

He soaks through Killua’s shirtfront when he hugs him, clasps strong arms around his middle and whirls him around, laughing his name.

“I found you!” he cries, as if it isn’t obvious, as if he’s not already making the scene of the century.

“F-fuck, you sure did,” breathes Killua, unsteady on his feet. Alluka might waive the swear-jar fee for this, for such an august moment. “How’d you do it?”

Gon smiles even wider, if that’s possible, elbowing him. “It wasn’t hard! You can find a deer by knowing where all the good grass is, and you can find a Killua by making a list of good toy stores. And an Alluka,” he adds, ruffling her hair, making her giggle. “‘S good to see you!”

Killua splutters, making a mental note to reexamine his itinerary. Mutters something about embarrassment, about how only an idiot like Gon could come up with such an elegant solution.

Then his shirt’s clammy against his chest, his fingers steepled, half-panicked. They’re running at decision speed, now--sooner or later, he’ll know whether any of what they were can be salvaged.

It doesn’t help his antsiness that Gon has gotten _handsome,_ solid and hale, two hundred pounds of weapons-grade strapping young lad. That old familiar shiver twitches through him, unsure if he’d rather clasp Gon’s hand or run for his life. _Not now,_ he tells it, _for fuck’s sakes._

Gon thrusts something out to him, and it works well enough to snap him out of it. It’s an envelope, waterlogged even though the paper is the thick, fancy sort. Ink trails blue across the back of it, but he can see it’s addressed to Gon’s house, Whale Island.

“Open it!” says Gon, “I brought it for you!”

It’s already been opened, the seal broken with a careful, clumsy hand. Killua shakes his head, finagles wet letter and envelope apart.

Gon is bouncing on the balls of his feet as Killua unfolds it, and Alluka can’t help but crane her neck.

It’s a wedding invitation, printed in script on cream-colored paper, accented in jewel-toned blue and red.

“They’re getting married!” Gon whoops, even though the writing is still perfectly legible. “Kurapika and Leorio--I got this in the mail last week, and I was so happy, and I thought ‘I’m going to see Killua at the wedding!’”

Killua smiles, deeply fond of the verve in Gon’s voice. There’s no slowing him down when he’s like this--it’s precious. He’s missed it, even though it hasn’t been all that long since he’d heard Gon speak.

“But then I thought, Killua doesn’t have an address! They can’t send him an invitation! And so I looked for you, and I spent a million years waiting in line at all these airports, and here I am, because I couldn’t let you miss it!”

Killua is, he’ll admit, a little stunned. He doesn’t respond, and they stand there a moment, the silence thick as dark matter.

“...Gon,” he deadpans, shaking his head. “Gon, you jackass, I have a phone. Leorio called me, I know.”

And then there they are again, howling, doubling over with laughter.

“I didn’t even _think_ of that!” laments Gon, palm clasped sheepish at the back of his neck.

“Gon, we--” Killua wheezes--”we talk on the phone. You text me all the time. You’ve texted me _in the past week._ Incredible.”

Each of Killua’s breaths are a laugh--it _is_ incredible. There’s no way in hell he hadn’t thought of it at some point--even though Gon scarcely has two brain cells to rub together.

Did Gon just want to see him that badly?

It could be, with the light pouring out of him, with that big goofy grin, the way he’s speaking with his hands. How he had, apparently, run here through the rain. How he looks so completely, so totally bombastically _happy._

And maybe it won’t be perfect--in fact, Killua’s certain it won’t be. And it won’t be the way it was, either, and that will indubitably be for the best. But Gon is here, after everything, still so sprightly and earnest and bright, and no amount of caution could keep Killua away.

**Author's Note:**

> hi! thanks for reading, i hope you enjoyed! i had a fantastic time writing this, it's the fic i wish i could have written when i was 16 watching hxh for the first time!
> 
> do let me know what you thought of this--i haven't written in this fandom for years and years and i Really Hope i was able to get the characterization right.
> 
> if you like, and you're over 18, you can come hang out with me on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) i need more hxh pals. :^>
> 
> have a good one!


End file.
